The invention relates to an electronic printer having a single element for tracing out alphanumeric characters.
There are known printers of the plotter type, in which the characters are traced out by a printing stylus under the control of stepping motors which cause a translation of the printing stylus and a rotation of the platen, respectively.
The known dot or plotter-type printing systems require the generation of separate codes not only for each different type style, but also for each variation in its dimensions and in the ratio between height and width of the character. Also the known ink jet printers, in which the jet is deflected by an electrostatic field or by means of an equivalent system, while able to attain very high printing speeds, cannot reach high quality of the printing because of the lack of rigid control of the actual movement imparted to the ink jet.
The same disadvantages are presented by other proposed printing devices or systems which plot the character by using the displacement of a stylus or a similar writing or printing element without this displacement being rigidly controlled, including the plotters where the stylus is controlled through the entire line.
In such known devices the shape of the character plotted can be altered by the effect of extraneous factors such as the times of response of the actuating devices, forces of inertia, the play of the printing elements and the friction against the paper.
The main object of the invention is to provide an easy and inexpensive interchangeability of the type style and of their dimensions in a printer capable of printing with an excellent quality and a practically unlimited choice of the type styles and the dimensions of the characters for any alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.